The tiger who drank from the tea pot: Millie Robins’ Sophie and Katie Tripp’s Mummy observe the teatime manners of Benjamin Stone’s Tiger in The Tiger Who Came To Tea. All pictures: Robert Day
THE Tiger Who Came To Tea is tucking in at York Theatre Royal on September 1 and 2, with an extra show added to the second day to meet ticket demand.
Commemorating the centenary of the birth of author Judith Kerr, the Olivier Award-nominated stage show is on tour in a musical production adapted and directed by David Wood.
Hailed as Britain’s best-loved picture book, Kerr’s classic is entering its 55th year, having sold more than five million copies since its first publication in 1968 with its story of the doorbell ringing just as Sophie and her mum are sitting down to tea. Who could it possibly be? What they do not expect to see at the door is a big furry, stripy tiger.
Wood’s 55-minute show premiered in 2008 and has since toured nationally and internationally, including Christmas seasons at the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Arts Centre with sold-out dates in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and Bahrain.
Teatime essentials: Benjamin Stone’s Milkman delivers more than the milk in The Tiger Who Came To Tea
Bringing the tea-guzzling tiger to life on stage, this musical slice of teatime mayhem serves up singalong songs, oodles of magic and interactive fun suitable for children aged three upwards.
In the cast will be Millie Robinsas Sophie, Katie Tripp as Mummy and the multi role-playing Benjamin Stone as Daddy, Milkman, Postman and Tiger, with Jack Huckin and Tia Bunce on understudy duty.
Wood is joined in the production team by designer Susie Caulcutt, assistant director/choreographer Emma Clayton, music arranger and supervisor Peter Pontzen, lighting designer Tony Simpson and sound designers Shock Productions. Scott Penrose, former president of the Magic Circle, provides the magical illusion designs.
Nicoll Entertainment presents The Tiger Who Came To Tea at York Theatre Royal, September 1, 2pm and 4.30pm, and September 2, 11am, 2pm and the late addition at 4.30pm. Ticket remain on sale for all performances with the best availability for the last show. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Everything stops for tea as Millie Robins’ Sophie entertains Benjamin Stone’s Tiger in The Tiger Who Came To Tea, on tour at York Theatre Royal next week
Tom Tom club: Olivia Caley’s Hattie with the two Toms, Jimmy Dalgleish, left, and Jack Hambleton, in Pick Me Up Theatre’s Tom’s Midnight Garden. Pictures: Matthew Kitchen
REVIEW: Tom’s Midnight Garden, Pick Me Up Theatre, John Cooper Studio, Theatre @41 Monkgate, York, until Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568; at pickmeuptheatre.com or in person from York Gin, 12, Pavement, and York Theatre Royal box office
IT is grimly impossible not to see everything anew
in the context of the crippling Coronavirus.
Within moments of Tom’s Midnight Garden opening,
the word “quarantine” is mentioned, and audience members turn to each other – keeping
a certain distance, of course – in recognition of its heightened resonance.
Adapted for the stage by David Wood, the doyen of
such transitions from print to boards, Philippa Pearce’s beloved novel is a
testament to the power of imagination, perhaps the most precious gift of all in
childhood, but one that dims through experience as we age.
Right now, we might all wish that the clock could
strike 13 and take us to somewhere magical, as it does in Tom’s Midnight
Garden, although George Orwell’s opening line to 1984, where the clocks en
masse were doing exactly that, is contrastingly heavy with sinister
forewarnings.
Pick Me Up director-designer Robert Readman sets up
the black-box John Cooper Studio in a traverse configuration, the audience to
either side of a stage book-ended by a door and lonely Tom’s bedroom away from
home at one end and a door and bored brother Peter’s bedroom back home at the
other, where he is quarantined with measles.
The setting is the dull 1950s, when Tom (a role
shared by Pick Me Up debutant Jimmy Dalgleish, in action on press night, and
Jack Hambleton) is staying with his kindly Aunt Gwen (Maggie Smales) and
pipe-smoking, Daily Mail-reading Uncle Alan (Andrew Isherwood).
At Tom’s end too is the aforementioned grandfather clock,
with its figure of an angel and an inscription, Time No Longer, taken from the
Book of Revelation, Chapter 10, Verse 6, and still today the subject of much
conjecture as to its possible meaning.
Even within Tom’s Midnight Garden, it draws a
scoffing comment, but if instead it can been seen as advocating that the
limitations, the boundaries, of time be removed, rather than as the end of
time, then it becomes the doorway to limitless imagination.
Ed Atkin as Peter, left, Jimmy Dalgleish as Tom, Olivia Caley as Hatty, Jack Hambleton as Tom and Beryl Nairn as Aunt Grace in Tom’s Midnight Garden
On the John Cooper Studio’s mezzanine level are not
only the bedrooms but also passageways to either side (not ideal, alas, as
anyone moving above you on your side is out of sight, and Readman might need to
re-block those moments to facilitate seeing them better).
Musical director Tim Selman, meanwhile, is
positioned in clear view at his piano beside Atkin’s Peter. Behind him are
cellist Lucy McLuckie and violinist Robert Bates, and together they perform a second
string to Atkin’s bow: his newly composed score that accompanies scenes played
out in the midnight garden of the title.
Occasionally on first night, the beautiful music impacted
on the clarity of the dialogue but the sound balance can be remedied.
A chorus gathers, chiming the mantra “Time no longer”,
as if bringing the clock to speaking life. Each day, that clock is wound up fastidiously
by the mysterious Mrs Bartholomew (Beryl Nairn), so stern of face she unnerves Tom’s
aunt and uncle.
When it strikes 11, 12, 13, pyjama-clad,
inquisitive Tom leaves his bed, makes his way downstairs, across the hall and
out of the door into a magical garden, initially depicted as a bright light. A
garden that only he can enter. A Victorian garden, where he encounters Victorian
orphan Hattie (Olivia Caley), the joyless Aunt Grace (Beryl Nairn, part two),
Bible-reading gardener Abel (Isherwood, part two) and assorted playful Victorian
children.
The garden scenes are played out on the empty
expanse between the two doors. No flowers, no secret passageways, everything
left to our imagination, save for chairs and gathered, elasticated black and
white ribbon strands at all four corners through which cast members pass, not exactly
with the greatest of ease.
Decide for yourself what they symbolise; maybe the
erosion of time; maybe the imagination at work; maybe time travel; maybe they just
look aesthetically pretty, matching the black and white of Readman’s overall design.
Here, across the time divide, Tom and Hattie can see each other when others cannot see him, and time passes at a different rate for each of them. This is a place of mystery and magic, but something darker if Abel’s biblical bent is to be believed, as if Tom were as meddlesome as Shakespeare’s Puck or J M Barrie’s Peter Pan.
Although imaginative, neither Readman’s direction,
nor design, are as magical as his best work. Wood’s script, however, captures fully
Pearce’s possibilities of make-believe, drawing you deep into Tom and Hattie’s
world, where sweetness and sadness elide, brought to life so evocatively by the
outstanding Caley, Dalgleish, Atkin, Smales and Nairn and Isherwood at the
double.
